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Tuesday, March 07, 2006

st: New book: An Introduction to Stata for Health Researchers

Dear Statalisters,

An Introduction to Stata for Health Researchers is now available; see
http://www.stata-press.com/books/ishr.html. It is, of course, not my job
to review it, but I can tell about my intents.

First, I wanted to make Stata more accessible to newcomers. Stata is a
very rich program, but to the newcomer it can be quite difficult to
decide where to start. I made a structured description, hopefully
succeeding in helping the newcomer understand where to look for what
information.

Second, I wanted to point to the data management tools and analyses most
frequently used in health research. I had no intent to compete with good
biostatistics and epidemiology textbooks, but rather to supplement them
with a toolbox to help doing typical tasks in Stata.

Third, I wanted to make the excellent graphics capabilities of Stata 8+
more accessible, and to assist in producing publication-ready graphs.

An finally, I wanted to focus not only on detail, but also on the larger
pictur concerning strategies for safe data handling and for preventing
errors and disasters. These are techniques like principles for giving
names to variables, datasets, and do-files, principles of documentation,
and techniques for backing up and archiving data.